Wednesday, January 25, 2012

My thoughts on the leaked sixth edition

FYI - this is the 100th post on the blog. Big Al owes me a cookie now. Heh !!

Some of you might remember that GW leaked the fifth edition rules prior to their official release—the pdf was well written and in line with what I would expect from GW... No typos, no grammatical errors, etc. The new Grey Knight codex was leaked as well—same deal... Well written and in line with what I would expect. Heck even fourth edition was officially leaked as version 3.5. We know these were all legit based upon the evidence at hand and no one can deny these as fact. On the other hand the 'leaked' sixth edition PDF looks like garbage in comparison in my opinion... Lots of typos and lots of grammatical errors... It looks like it could have been written by an average teenager to me. The rules presented in the leaked sixth edition at best are extremely complex and very hard to follow. People have gone so far as to present video batreps on the internet based upon these leaked rules and they have made a bundle of errors. I think if they were truly honest they would admit they don't fully understand how these rules are intended to work. The enthusiasm is great but I feel it's misguided.

What I want for sixth is a very tight set of rules that are well written plus I think they should be easy to understand and apply. All this blah blah blah about how stale is 5th edition isn't going to change anything. No one was complaining about fifth edition prior to this leak as far back as I can remember. We all know 6th will be released some time this year—don't get yer knickers all bunched up and knotted. Oh and be very careful what you wish for... More complex invariably means more arguments and more time required to play. Fifth edition is the best yet and it fixed a lot of the problems with fourth edition. Hopefully sixth edition will be even better and address the problems we have found in fifth edition.

So why do people like the leaked ruleset? I think the answer is that they believe it will change the current meta, nerf some of the top tiered armies and make more of the lower tiered armies more powerful. The truth is every new edition has changed the meta and invariably shifted the balance of power. It is what it is.